Distributed Presence

Two hundred years ago, if I walked across the town square to greet a visitor to our town, this would constitute a local social interaction. If I call someone on the phone or speak to a large group at a conference—it's still social interactions, the former at a distance and the latter distributed among many recipients. If the speech at the conference is delivered in a prerecorded manner or with a non–interactive live feed the social aspect is lost. Historically, social interactivity has been sensitive to the nuances of simultaneous (synchronic) presence.

Technologies, and the world wide web specifically, have challenged this historical sensitivity by facilitating both asynchronous and presence–by–proxy social interactions. An avatar is a socially acceptable representation of presence (proxy) characterized as permission–based attention and willingness for interactions.

Somewhat of a circuitous path to the question what is social media? At one level social media is any media that is socially produced? From a business perspective, this is user–generated content (UGC), generated by individuals, collectives of individuals (e.g., corporations, organizations), or their representational agents—avatars, or user–generated presences (UGPs).

Social media, or UGC, is seen in two broad venues: open access (to all, in–the–wild), permission–based access (walled–garden, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, a corporation's blog or wiki).

Content, Presence, Permission, and Venue

	in–the–wild	walled–garden
UGC	?	?
UGP	?	?

The table above is a marked simplification of the problem with social media. There are four variables: content, presence, permission, and venue. The simple 3×3 matrix assumes static content, representational presence, and permission set—allowing for a variance in venue alone. Collectively this might be termed a distributed presence that is socially consumable. Contrast this with the town square of two hundred years ago—where we had to contend only with local presence.

Social media perhaps is a misnomer, because it's not about the media per se, but rather the relationship (actual or putative) that drives the participatory nature. It's customers, clients, recruits, partners, lovers, etc. The media is actually an inducement, maintenance, or termination of relationship. The media, because of the nature of the world wide web, has the added dimensions of context (original and appropriated), permanency, and breaches in privacy or security with separate and indepedent impacts upon relationship.

Social media is probably not a thing at all—not a blog post, a tweet, a video upload, nor a meetup. It's a socially perceived manifestation (social breadcrump) of a process—the management of a distributed presence as the currency for distributed relationships between individuals and collectives of individuals.